The present invention relates to electronic montage creation devices which create the image of a face.
Conventionally, small portable electronic devices have been sold as articles which are typified by electronic notebooks which, for example, stores data on input names, addresses, telephone numbers beforehand and displays such data, as required.
Such device is capable of storing and displaying only data on letters and numerals and cannot sometimes remind user of a person's figure (especially, his face) from displayed data.
It could be conceived to beforehand store data on persons' names, addresses, and telephone numbers along with data on their images obtained from their photographs, using an image scanner, and to display a person's name, address, and telephone number along with his image. Generally, the amount of image data is immense, so that there is the problem that the image data would easily overflow a memory of a small portable electronic device when it is stored as it is in the memory.
Electronic notebooks with a montage display function have been put to practical use which combine a plurality of pattern images prepared beforehand to display the resulting montage to thereby handle a greatly reduced amount of data in order to cope with the above problem.
Those notebooks prepare a plurality of pattern images of each of the arts of a person's face such as an outline, a hair style, a front hair, eyebrows, eyes, a nose and a mouth, selects a pattern image having an appropriate form for each part by means of a number, combines those selected part patterns into a montage image, and displays same.
For example, even when the owner of the electronic notebook cannot reminded of a person's face from data on his name, address and telephone number alone, he can instruct the notebook to display a montage image which gets a clue to reminding of the face of the recorded person.
Thus, the image of a person's face can be displayed without increasing the capacity of the data memory.
However, as described above, such conventional montage display electronic notebook which is a montage display prepares a plurality of pattern images of each of the parts of a face which are an outline, a hair style, a front hair, eyebrows, eyes, a nose and a mouth, and combines selected pattern images into a person's face image. Thus, the notebook has the following problems.
In the creation of a montage, the user selects by visual comparison pattern images closest to the respective parts of a person's face whose montage is to be created from prepared pattern images of each of the outlines, hair styles, etc. In this case, the number of pattern images combined is immense, so that operation is troublesome and substantial skill is required to create a montage similar to the face of a target person.
Thus, although the electronic notebook has the function of creating a montage, there are only a few users who are able to use that function effectively. In some cases, no montage functions were used.
In order to simplify the creation of a montage as much as possible, the present inventors filed an application for a patent on an electronic montage creation device which prepared for several basic face patterns beforehand, selected the most appropriate ones from among those basic face patterns, and changed the respective part pattern images of the selected basic face pattern to finish a target montage image (U.S. Ser. No. 08/062,994, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,537,662 issued on Jul. 16, 1996).
This device, however, must also select by visual comparison pattern images of the parts of a face closest to a person's face to be created from among a plurality of prepared pattern images of each of the respective parts of the person's face. In order to create a montage similar to the face of the target person, some skill is required.